Robert Bresson | Au Hasard Balthazar / 1966, USA 1970

saint balthazar

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Bresson (screenwriter and director) Au Hasard Balthazar / 1966, USA 1970

 

Perhaps my favorite of Bresson's excellent films is Au Hasard Balthazar of 1966, perhaps because it is one of his richest and yet most forgiving of all this director's films. For the characters of Balthazar, each suffering or causing others to suffer, are also likeable human beings for whom the filmgoer feels, despite their failures.

 

    At the center of this parable-like tale, is the donkey Balthasar, given upon birth to a young girl, Marie (the beautiful Anne Wiazemsky), who lives with her schoolteacher father (Philippe Asselin) and her mother (Nathalie Joyaut) on a farm whose owner also has a son her age, Jacques (Walter Green) and a sickly daughter. The three children, particularly the closely knit Jacques and Marie, lovingly care for and pet the animal, even performing over him a kind of baptism, which hints at the specialness of this beast.

     When those childrens' mother dies, the father with his son and daughter move away, leaving the farm to the schoolteacher, who has always wanted to try his hand at farming with modern methods. But as a busy farmer with a now pubescent daughter less attentive to Balthasar, he determines the animal is no longer worth keeping, and sells him to the local baker.

     Meanwhile, a small town thug, Gérard (Francois Lafarge) and his gang, have been sneaking into the farm, torturing the donkey while attempting to attract the attention of Marie. By coincidence, the baker hires Gérard to deliver his bread to outlying regions, using Balthasar as the beast of burden.

     One day, while out driving, Marie observes the boy and her former donkey, and stops to pet the animal. Gérard enters her car and refuses to leave, followed by a series of pushing and pulling between the two that ends, predictably, with sex. That incident begins a long and abusive relationship between the two that scandalizes her family and enrages the small town.

     Marie's father, meanwhile, has been a topic of gossip for the townspeople, mostly out of envy for his success, and when the gossip reaches the ears of the former owner, he demands a reckoning of accounts. Guiltless, Marie's father refuses to produce them, and the farm is taken from him. Jacques returns to try to reconcile the situation, but the father refuses to speak with him.

     Because of Gérard's continual abuse of the donkey, the animal ultimately refuses to move, as the boy ties a newspaper around his tail and sets it on fire. The animal runs off in terror, and when Gérard finds him, he unwillingly moves on. By the next day, however, Balthasar refuses to even rise, as the baker prepares to euthanatize him. A local drunk takes him on, using him and another donkey to bear the burden of his menial tasks. He alternates with love and brutality as well, and, at one point, in the middle of a city street, the animal escapes his tormentor.

     The next adventure for the poor donkey is at a circus, where he introduced to the other animals. Bresson's beautiful presentation of the animals' eye-to-eye contact, the doleful donkey meeting first a lion, then a polar bear, a monkey, and an elephant. A circus trainer perceives the donkey's intelligence and trains him to become a kind of Clever Hans who counts out major multiplications and divisions of numbers with his hoof. The animal is brilliant until he sees the drunk in the crowd and fearing him, breaks into a braying that ruins the act. Returned to the drunk, the donkey escapes once more, finding his way back to Marie and the farm.

     By this time, however, Marie has become so involved with Gérard and his friends, whom Bresson portrays almost as a French equivalent of a gang of hoodlums—that she rarely returns home—her parents caught up in their grieving for her and their idyllic past.

     The donkey is sent off to a local recluse, who uses the poor animal to grind wheat, beating the beast whenever it pauses in its endless circle of pain.   

      Miraculously the town drunk receives an inheritance, and celebrates with the young hoodlums and others at a local bar. Gérard, now drunk and almost in a rage, destroys most of the bar, dancing with another girl and refusing to even touch Marie. Marie, finally determined to escape her friends, shows up at the farm of the recluse, begging to stay in the barn for the night. He refuses, bringing her within the house, where she feeds herself—against his will—while discussing his greed. The evening ends with her offering him sex in return for a bed.

     Ultimately, Marie returns home, and her mother insists that Balthazar be brought back to console her in her sorrow. Jacques revisits the family, offering to marry Marie, promising to never remind her of her past. But almost the moment he turns away to confer with her father, Gérard and his gang carry her off, raping her and leaving her naked in a nearby granary. Marie leaves forever, the father left to suffer, and, after a brief visit from the priest, to die.

    

      Marie's mother, completely desolate, is visited by Gérard and his friends, who want to borrow the donkey for the night, but she refuses. He is all she has, she insists, and "Besides, he's a saint." Later they steal the animal, using it to traffic goods—chocolates, hosiery, liquor, etc.—across the Swiss border. Authorities cry out "Customs Halt," and begin shooting, the boys running off. The donkey stands alone against the landscape as the camera moves in to reveal that Balthazar is bleeding.

     By the morning the animal is on its knees as a herd of sheep move toward him, and surround. By the time the herd has moved on, we see Balthazar lying upon his side, dead.

     For all the tears these last scenes bring to our eyes, however, Bresson's tale, we realize, is not as bleak as it sounds. In part, we readily recognize that all of the individuals of the film, cruel or loving, are humans very much like us. At times each of them is beautiful. Even the wrathful Gérard, sings out in a lovely voice in the church and is a stunningly sexual youth. As some critics have pointed out, each of the film's characters, while revealing themselves as potentially caring individuals, seem also to be inflicted with one of the seven deadly sins, a flaw which removes him or her from grace.

     The director reveals the complexity of their desires and behavior through images of their legs, eyes, and, as in most of his films, most potently, through their hands. From the first images of the children's hands petting Balthazar's body, hands reached out with sugar to feed him, and hands pouring water upon the beast's head, we recognize that it is the empty hand, the open giving hand that signifies love and salvation. But here we simultaneously witness filled hands: hands holding sticks, whips, chairs, and guns, flattened hands that slap, clenched fists that pummel and beat. In one scene we witness Marie upon a bench, with Gérard crouching behind her, offering his hand in love, which she refuses. While a few images later, we see him and his gang hurling their fists against the donkey's hide. It is precisely this duality of experience, the simultaneous existence of long hands laid to rest, against clenched and closed hands of punishment, hurt, and hate, that is clearly Bresson's central image. Almost every figure of the film has within them the potentiality of either greedily grabbing at life or openly excepting experience, and it is their alternate decisions of which position to take that result in love or sorrow.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2011).